5 Famous Movie Scenes Made Possible by Reckless Endangerment

As we've mentioned before, sometimes the best way for a director to capture pain and suffering is to make the cast suffer actual pain, because that whole "acting" thing is seriously overrated. Thus the following directors turned their sets into torture chambers for artistic purposes, and/or because they just hated actors.

#5. James Cameron Almost Drowns His Cast and Himself

20th Century Fox

We've covered The Abyss' amazing technological leaps, but we neglected to mention that 40 percent of the shooting took place in an abandoned underwater nuclear tank, which doesn't exactly conjure up images of tea parties and pony rides. For starters, there's the iconic scene where Ed Harris is introduced to the magic goop that will let him breathe underwater.

20th Century FoxMade by dipping gillyweed in the suit's urine compartment.

This fluid actually exists in real life, but the only man who's tested it nearly bought the kelp farm. Not wanting to take his chances with a magical mystery liquid, Harris opted to hold his breath whenever he had to film in the suit. So when Harris is gasping and seizing up in panic as his helmet fills, he ain't acting.

As it turns out, nearly drowning was something of a running theme on the set. Another scene involved actors swimming without helmets, and since nobody in the cast was Aquaman, Cameron employed safety divers to stick life-giving oxygen into their faces. Then he told them to stay way the hell away from the camera, so if any of those scenes had gone wrong, the safety divers would have had a nice long swim to get to whoever's lungs were quickly filling with water. Oh, and one time a diver used an oxygen regulator incorrectly and pumped water into Harris' mouth instead of air and nearly killed him. Whoops-a-daisy!

It gets better. In order to ensure that nobody accidentally floated up to the surface, the actors were all strapped down with weights, meaning weak swimmers were screwed, and strong swimmers ... were also screwed. Yes, Cameron kept his actors in line with the same method the mafia uses to dispose of bodies.

All the hard work and stress (along with the constant threat of decompression sickness) caused Harris to break down and cry one evening and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio to famously scream "We're not animals here!" before storming off the set. Cameron responded to their extremely understandable concerns by calling anyone who couldn't keep up "wussies," because this was before he filmed Titanic and invented the concept of love.

In fairness to Cameron, he was putting his life on the line right there with them. One day both Cameron and his assistant forgot to check the oxygen meter on his tank and, well, you can guess what happened next. Again, a safety diver gave him water instead of air, and Cameron had to cold-cock him in the face so he could escape to the surface moments before blacking out. Both the diver and the assistant were fired, and humanity narrowly avoided living in a dark timeline where Terminator 2 was never made. If you can call that living.

#4. Roman Polanski Is a One-Man Army of Terror

Paramount Pictures

Roman Polanski is simultaneously one of the most sympathetic and terrible people in movie history. And we're not just talking about his personal life -- he's directed classic films like Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, but his directing methods apparently came out of the Stasi's torture handbook.

Ian Tyas/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesHe used microphones and cameras to keep actors under surveillance at all times.

In Rosemary's Baby, there's a scene where the unraveling Mia Farrow eats raw liver. Health risks aside, Farrow was a vegetarian. Polanski, giving precisely zero fucks, made her repeatedly eat the real stuff over several takes. Then he made her walk into traffic, possibly because she kept complaining about the liver. But don't worry -- he promised her that no one would hit a woman who looked pregnant. So either Polanski had never heard the word "accident," or he didn't care enough about Farrow's life to come up with a believable justification.

Suseno/WikimediaPlus, her death would have provided enough liver for at least two sequels.

Polanski's increasing fame and fortune just fueled his insanity. In his 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, he decided to add a scene where a bear gets attacked by a pack of dogs, because nothing says Shakespeare like animal fights.

But he couldn't have dogs attack a real bear, because that would be cruel. So Polanski dressed a stuntman up in a bear suit and set three attack dogs on him. The pooches were so vicious that the stuntman feared for his life, and on the next take insisted that he could only handle one dog, or perhaps maybe a pack of poodles. Polanski nodded, made his best "I appreciate your concern" face, and unleashed all three again.

Columbia PicturesBut as a precaution, he rubbed the costume with cat hair. Dogs don't like cats, right?

During the filming of Chinatown, he ripped a strand of hair out of Faye Dunaway's head because it was catching too much light (apparently "scissors" also isn't in Polanski's vocabulary) and gave himself a cameo where he stuck a prop knife up Jack Nicholson's nose that could have sliced Nicholson's extremely bankable face open if he held it the wrong way. Polanski purposely didn't show Nicholson how he was holding it, because ethical motivational techniques take, like, effort and shit. We're surprised he didn't actually just murder Dunaway at the end of the movie.

#3. Stanley Kubrick Starts His Career With a Gas Attack

The famously insane Stanley Kubrick was just 24 when he made Fear and Desire, a film about four soldiers who are stuck behind enemy lines and slowly lose their minds, possibly because they had to work with Stanley Kubrick. Since at this point in his career Kubrick was just a creepy-looking guy who had made a few documentaries, he didn't have much of a budget to work with. He therefore had to improvise most of the film's special effects without taking little things like "safety" and "common sense" into consideration.

In particular, he wanted one of the final scenes to be shrouded in fog. Lacking a fog machine, Kubrick, like the evil twin of MacGyver, built one himself by pouring mineral oil and water into a crop sprayer ... without first removing the toxic insecticide already in it.

The fog looked fantastic, but it turned Fear and Desire into The Mist as the drifting insecticide nearly asphyxiated the cast and crew. Collapsing in desperation and acting insane must have been easy when the actors were surrounded by a lethal cloud of poisonous gas.

Kubrick would later disown Fear and Desire, ostensibly because he considered it amateurish, but possibly because someone actually was killed and he wanted to hide the evidence. However, the accidental unleashing of toxic inhalants gave Kubrick his first near-murder boner, inspiring him to purposely harass his actors throughout the rest of his professional life. This is how great careers start, kids!